How to keep meetings short: 5 tricks

In the never ending pile of meeting tips, here are 5 five more:

Making the meeting rooms 5 degrees colder than everywhere else. First it keeps people awake, second it gives them a biological reason to want to resolve issues and get out of the room quickly.
Remove the chairs from the room. This is an old one, popularized by SCRUM for their standing meeting idea. If people have to stand they are less prone to rambling, to distraction, and have the sense they are on the way to something else, all good qualities for most status type meetings to have. I’ve always loved the 3 question model SCRUM advocates. Instead of resume length status reports, it’s boom boom boom, next. Love it.
Have uncomfortable chairs. Just saw this on kottke.org. These are chairs designed to be uncomfortable or difficult to sit in at all, so people don’t want to stay long. The talking head chair is my favorite.
Pick the right person to run the meeting. Some people are good at being meeting gestapos, and some are pansies. Don’t let a pansy run a meeting, even if the pansy is you. Someone has to put up an agenda, cut people off who ramble too far off the agenda for bad reasons, and keep the show on time so it ends early enough that everyone won’t be late for the next meeting.
Split announcements from discussions. A meeting between 4 people where they are developing ideas, exploring alternatives and going deep is one thing. That’s a discussion. An entirely other thing are meetings centered on status reports, announcements, and other boring low priority stuff. Make the difference clear. If you’re doing the former, it should be a small group, and the meeting can go as long as it needs to. If it’s the later, it should be a bigger group, and it should be as short as possible (any discussions that last longer than 60 seconds in a status meeting should be tabled to a separate meeting of only the 4 people who actually care). If your team respects your ability to distinguish between these things, they will respect your meetings by showing up, in response to the respect you show them by not wasting their time.

See also:

the popular post how to start meetings on time (The honest version)
Chapter 10 in my book Making things happen, is titled How not to annoy people, and it’s all about how to run different kinds of meeting in the right way.

Posted Monday, December 15th, 2008 at 4:14 pm

in Making things happen, Management | 5 Comments » |

Kevin - December 15, 2008 at 5:01 pm

How about one simple rule… vote with your feet and leave. If a meeting isn’t valuable and you don’t need to be there, then just leave.

Otherwise, I feel like too much time is spent villifying meetings as a big waste of time. I am not talking about Scott personally here, but rather generally. The bigger problem I find in my own work is that I am not spending *enough* time meeting with people, and too much time trying to be a hero on my own.

Scott - December 15, 2008 at 5:08 pm

You’re right. Meetings shouldn’t be vilified. It’s the people who run them poorly that are the villains.

I like voting with feet. I believe most meetings should be optional. If the topic isn’t important to you, why should you be expected to go? I’m pretty sure I advocate this in Making Things Happen. It’s a good test. If you call a meeting, and say its optional, and no one comes, well, you know you’re making some big and bad assumptions about your team. It’s good feedback.

Paul Ritchie - December 16, 2008 at 11:13 am

Another variation on the “uncomfortable” theme is to use a room that is slightly too small. It works wonders to keep folks focused and discourages the merely curious from poking their heads in…